there is a feature to stop at caught and uncaught exceptions. while useful for own exceptions that are thrown at a few places, the feature isn't useful for most runtimeexceptions like NullPointerException or ClassNotFoundException. In most cases, the exception i'm trying to fix is being thrown in class x at line y. i cannot simply add a break point there because the code is called Z times (z may be really big). it's also impossible to use the exception breakpoint here because it will stop at any exception thrown inside the jre, which is a lot. stopping only at uncaught exceptions won't help, because almost every exception is caught and wrapped into another in any bigger application, so the break point won't do anything here. the solution would be to add an exception breakpoint for a specific method, class, package and module.